I gave my first keynote presentation when I was eighteen. Since then, I’ve come up against dang near every minor and moderate issue a presenter might encounter.
As writers, panels, conferences, readings, classes and workshops are likely to come our way. I’m not going to speak here about choosing your topic or material, or outlining and establishing a talk or class (but will later, if folks are interested!). Instead, we’re going to chat about… problems.
No matter how fantastic the story you’ll be reading or how perfect the PowerPoint you’ve created, the difference between a great presentation—for you and your audience—and a bad presentation doesn’t lie in whether you encounter problems. It depends on how well you face the challenge, crisis, or OH SHIT moment.
We could drill through a score of subcategories and specifics. But we’re going to touch on the three areas most speaking challenges fall under: Technology Is Fickle, Who the Hell Is In Charge, and I Misjudged My Audience.
- Technology Is Fickle
Don’t skip this one, thinking your talks are “too small” to involve AV equipment. Electricity falls under “technology,” and the power grid doesn’t care if you have twenty-seven people ready to learn self-defense in a windowless hotel conference room when a lacking-judgement squirrel loses its life to a transformer up the road.
Yep, it happened. Continue reading Speaking of Authors Speaking…
